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(Gemba Research: Mukilteo, WA) -- Don’t miss the next Japan Kaikaku Experience, a best-practice benchmarking tour of lean manufacturing companies in Japan. This is a full-immersion experience in lean culture. The kaikaku tour is designed to open your eyes, broaden your horizons, deepen your…
(AMT: McLean, VA) -- October U.S. manufacturing technology consumption totaled $387.13 million, according to The Association for Manufacturing Technology (AMT) and the American Machine Tool Distributors’ Association (AMTDA). This total, as reported by companies participating in the U.S.…
There are times when we make decisions at work that are more personal in nature. To us, they may seem harmless because they are not intended to interfere with our day-to-day activities on the job. Although sometimes done with the best of intentions, these decisions can also hamper our efforts to…
(Institute for Healthcare Improvement: Cambridge, MA) -- During Dec. 9–12, some 50 patient activist leaders travelled to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) National Forum on Quality Improvement in Orlando, Florida, to share experiences and consider ways to combine forces to be that…
(Profit Finders: Strongsville, OH) -- Profit Finders, a proprietary data collection and analysis company, has developed a web-based technology rooted in the concepts of lean manufacturing and continuous improvement. The technology is designed to capture and analyze detailed cost and process data.…
(Zagat Survey: New York) -- As consumers gear up for the holiday travel season, Zagat Survey has released the results of its 2010 airline survey. The survey covers 16 domestic and 74 international airlines, as well as 30 major domestic airports. Conducted on ZAGAT.com, the survey is based on more…
(Marcus Evans: Hollywood, FL) -- Aerospace and defense manufacturers need to provide change at much higher speeds as the industry heads toward downsizing, says Bruce Weinberg, vice president of Operations at L-3 Communications Corp. They must look internally to create an environment of continuous…
(T&D Corp.: Matsumoto, Japan) -- T&D Corp. has released the TR-5i series of data loggers, a more powerful and functional family of data loggers. The TR-5i lineup includes the TR-51i with internal temperature sensor and the TR-52i with external temperature sensor; you get the same great…
(CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- In the book Leading the Lean Healthcare Journey: Driving Culture Change to Increase Value (CRC Press, 2010), by Joan Wellman, Patrick Hagan, and Dr. Howard Jeffries, every health care organization can learn from Seattle Children’s Hospital’s continuous improvement…
(PIQC: Lahore, Pakistan) -- The PIQC Institute of Quality (formerly Pakistan Institute of Quality Control) and the Quality and Productivity Society of Pakistan (QPSP) jointly announce the 12th International Convention on Quality Improvement (ICQI 2011) and the 2nd Regional Conference of Asian…
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eginning last week with “This Year in Quality, Part One,” the editors of Quality Digest Daily took a look at its stories and news articles throughout 2010 and collected what we thought were the most remarkable in the world of quality. From precision measurement to 3-D scanning, from Six Sigma…
The other day on the radio I heard these lyrics from the song, “If You Only Knew,” by Shinedown, “It’s 4:03 and I can’t sleep… I toss and turn like the sea.” I thought, “Yeah, why is it always 4 a.m. that I wake up when I’m worried about something?” The singer of this top 10 pop rock song was…
(Delcam: Windsor, ON, Canada) -- Delcam has launched the 2011 version of its PowerINSPECT inspection software. This new release makes the analysis of results even easier with the introduction of a “Quick Report” option. It also incorporates improvements to the handling of point-cloud data and…
(Fluke Corp.: Everett, WA) -- The first IEC 61010, CAT III 1000V/CAT IV 600V safety-rated portable oscilloscope, the Fluke 190 Series II ScopeMeter, is the only scope designed to be safely used on industrial three-phase power electronic equipment. Yet it offers the fast sampling (up to 2.5 GS/sec/…
(QI Macros: Denver) -- Most people are afraid of math and statistics. They worry that they’re not smart enough to use them correctly, or that someone will challenge them. And who can blame them when statistics “speak” is loaded with phrases like, “cannot reject the null hypothesis.” Great jargon…
(WCBF: Chicago) -- WCBF’s 10th Annual Lean Six Sigma and Process Improvement in Healthcare Summit, “Healthcare Transformation to Achieve and Sustain Excellence—Culture, Leadership, and the Impact of Government-Initiated Reform” is the largest gathering of senior-level executives responsible for…
(Taylor Hobson: Leicester, England) -- Taylor Hobson, a global provider of ultra-precision measurement instrumentation, has further expanded the capabilities of its Talysurf family of metrology instruments by launching the Talysurf Optics 3D. Based on the established PGI Blu, the new PGI Optics 3D…
(Cognex Corp.: Natick, MA) -- Cognex Corp. has announced its next-generation OmniView 360° inspection system, now with color and five-megapixel, high-resolution cameras. OmniView allows detailed inspection and verification of unoriented wine and juice bottles, canned goods, pharmaceutical vials,…
Pharmaceutical manufacturer Johnson & Johnson, which for decades has enjoyed a trusted reputation for soothing babies and overcoming head colds, is currently facing criminal investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit closed a…
The discoveries of superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect, and the fractional quantum Hall effect were all the result of measurements made at increasingly lower temperatures. Now, pushing the regime of the very cold into the very small, a team of researchers from the National Institute of…
Yes, it happened again. According to a recent Associated Press story, drinking glasses produced in China, featuring comic and superhero characters, have been discovered to contain extremely high levels of lead. Excessive amounts of cadmium were revealed in the glasses as well.
This has been a…
(Zwick Roell: Ulm, Germany) -- Efficient, cost-effective materials testing is essential for today’s plastics and textile industries. Zwick’s roboTest F robotic testing system offers a compact solution for automated tensile tests on dimensionally unstable specimens. Operating the system is easy,…
(PPT Vision: Bloomington, MN) -- PPT VISION Inc. announces the high-resolution IMPACT M-390 Smart Cameras, which deliver greater accuracy for high-precision machine vision applications. The cameras can be used as part of PPT VISION’s IMPACT M-Series Embedded Vision System—a single system with four…
(Bruker Corp.: Tucson, AZ) -- At the Materials Research Society (MRS) fall 2010 meeting in late November, Bruker Corp. released AcuityXR, a novel optical surface profiler that combines Bruker hardware and software technology to enable select ContourGT noncontact, 3-D optical surface profilers to…
(Baumer Ltd.: Southington, CT) -- With its DSRC strain ring series, Baumer Ltd. offers flexible solutions for measuring cyclical processes such as tension, compression, and torque. The strain rings offer a good repeatability of 0.1 percent of full scale (F.S.). based on its STRAIN…